Cross posted at the front pages of My Left Wing and Pen and Sword. Also at Kos.
I tried to watch the entire CSPAN coverage of General John Abizaid’s testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, but I could only take it in short bursts. What I heard from the head of Central Command live was the same menu of happy horse feathers he’s been spreading around the beltway and the airways with a straight face for the last couple of years.
The Iraqi army is performing well. The Iraqi government is confident that things will work out. We should stick by Nuri al Malaki’s government until it proves it can’t get the job done. Boo talk about how if we don’t fight “them” in Iraq and Afghanistan we’ll be fighting them here. We have to be patient. After all, it took America over a decade to sort out its own democracy.
A USA Today blurb says Abizaid told the committee that “force caps” or “timetables” imposed on U.S. presence in Iraq will limit the military’s “flexibility.” Retired General Eric Shinseki was right, Abizaid told the committee, when he said the military would need “several hundred thousand troops” to secure Iraq after the major combat operations phase, but no more troops are needed in Iraq right now. Conversely, any significant reduction in U.S. troop strength over the next six months will lead to increased sectarian violence and weaken the Iraqi government’s ability to get the country under control. Overall, Abizaid is optimistic about the way things are going.
What was the point of getting rid of Donald Rumsfeld just to keep his uniformed echo chamberlains like Abizaid around?
The Iraqi army is not performing well. It’s individual members don’t show up to fight if they don’t want to, and nobody wants to force them to fight because then they’d just desert. The Iraqi police are infested with gangsters and militiamen. Iraqi civilians don’t trust them and neither do U.S. troops.
How much longer do we need to trust in the Iraqi government’s confidence? How much longer do we let Maliki continue to prove that he can’t get the job done?
“They” can’t get here from there, whether we’re there or not. “They” don’t have a navy or an air force that can bring them here, and it’s too far to swim or jump. You’d think a four-star general like Abizaid would be aware of that.
Eleven years elapsed between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution. America was not torn with civil war or sectarian violence or at the mercy of rogue militias during that time, nor did we ask the British to stick around and help us with our internal security until we could get our act together.
If we needed more troops in Iraq before it went to hell in a bucket, and security situation is worse there now than it was then, why is it we don’t need more troops now?
In the House
I caught most of Abizaid’s testimony to the House in the afternoon. His uniform still looked sharp. No doubt his aids had plenty of spares available for him to change into throughout the course of the congressional hearings. That’s the sort of a thing a four-star’s aids do, especially when their boss has to talk to Congress all day on national television. But General Abizaid’s aids couldn’t hand him a fresh laundered face or physique, and over the course of the afternoon House hearings, Abizaid started to sag under the façade of his starched exterior. The bags under his eyes, the droop of the flap under his chin, and even the swell of his fingers reflected the effects of stress on a 50-something career Army officer who dreamed in his West Point days of being another George Patton, not another William Westmoreland.
The questions the House Armed Services Committee threw at him seemed less volatile than those he faced at the Senate hearing. Maybe that was because lower house members consider themselves B list celebrities and figure they don’t have the cachet to pitch fastballs at a four star general the way senators do. Maybe the representatives felt sorry for Abizaid because they understood what a drubbing he’d taken all morning from the A list superstars in the upper house. From the sound of things, John McCain took a cheese grater to his face.
I can almost feel sorry for Abizaid too. Now that Rumsfeld is gone, he’s become the head whipping boy for everybody in Congress who Rumsfeld torqued off.
But then I consider: this is the four-star general in charge of two failing wars in two failing states, and here he is telling both houses of Congress that things are going well, the troop levels are fine.
Brother. All this sound and fury about changing the course, we’ll continue to keep doing what we’ve been doing and pray for a miracle. We’ll have four to six more months of faith based strategy and then take another look at how things are going.
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.
I watched also, mostly feeling confused. I can’t begin to understand things in the way that you do based on your life experience. Now I can’t imagine why he is putting himself through this and our troops as well. I found myself fascinated with this more embeds thing needed for training Iraqi forces so that they could take over. Have had friends over there in some pretty hot spots but was always told not to worry because they put as much distance between US forces and Iraqis as possible in order to avoid more casualties and save lives. Just because an Iraqi is part of Iraqi forces doesn’t mean they won’t take out a United States soldier or be a suicide bomber if the opportunity arose. There is not one shred of evidence that having more “embeds” to train will help anything at all and there is evidence that it will only increase the casualty count as embeds are targeted and everybody in their vicinity is taken out.
…and whenever I hear the four-star in charge talking Rovewellian nonesense, I despair that anyone knows what they’re doing.
if all else fails, we can Tilt and “Unleash the Shiites?”
(h/t:a Laura Rozen report – war and piece)
Both the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees’ hearings of yesterday can be seen via the C-SPAN website.
Two sets of questions in the House hearing caught my attention:
Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI)
Abercrombie: What do we tell our troops when they go on patrol… how do they tell the difference between “good” militias and “bad” militias?
Abizaid bluffed through a response on that one.
Rep. Marty Meehan (D-MA) noted that a dramatically increasing number of deaths is resulting from sniper teams. He criticized the military for being slow to adapt, e.g., body armor and the joint IED defeat task force. On Nov. 1 he had written Sec. Rumsfeld to convene a task force on responding to the snipers, to look at the available technology. He asked about the development and distribution of certain systems (e.g., “Boomerang”). Abizaid preferred to answer that in a closed session.
…to answer those questions in a closed session. Better to get whipped in the woodshed than in the living room.
but he’s not praying.
An amazing display of towing the party line.
How do these people sleep at night?
We always used to say that the academy types were issued knee pads during Plebe week.
I listen, and I find myself expecting to hear him say that we can see the “light at the end of the tunnel” in Iraq.